After last night’s sneerquence, I needed to post a… counter-sneerquence? Sneer-critical sequence? in order to reset my net sneering value to zero and restore order and beauty in the universe. Here goes.
This is a really insightful comment by /u/Triple_Elation. The last paragraph in particular struck a chord with me:
Consider how throughout the movie Shrek, as a viewer you are completely on board with the message that you shouldn’t judge anyone on their outwards appearance, and also you are on board with Shrek ridiculing Lord Farquaad’s short stature, and you don’t see any inherent problem in this, because Lord Farquaad is an asshole. This is kind of like that. I think “Mistake vs. Conflict” ruffled so many feathers here exactly because it condescended to this simple view – that good and evil do exist outside of wanky meta-arguments about which arguments you’re allowed to use; a view which to many people feels natural and obvious, especially to people who are trodden-upon by the Farquaads of the world.
I found it a beautiful expression of a simple idea. It’s been bouncing around in my head over the past week or so – but gradually I started to feel more and more like there was something wrong with this line of thinking. I know this isn’t normally a debate subreddit but I hope you’ll hear me out.
Lord Farquaad is an asshole. He’s also a villain in a kids’ movie. Most people are not on that level of assholery, but it’s easy to forget that. People who disagree with you, when encountered in the wild, are rarely gentle or polite about it. They may be petty and spiteful. They may mock everything that’s crucially important to you. Very often they look different from you, they talk differently from you, they have their own jargon that’s specially designed to affirm their identity and drag down yours. It takes active effort to resist the idea that these are just Bad People who cannot be reasoned with.
In the case of SSC, the effort would be wasted, because SSC/rationalism is a haven for the actual Farquaads of this world – the racists and incels and sex-cult leaders and what have you – which is the whole point of SneerClub. No disagreement from me there. But I’ll contend that the whole Good vs. Evil mindset, capital letters and all, has taken over political debate to a large extent – not just the parts of it that deal with the crazy fringes, where it would be appropriate.
This creates two problems.
First, it leads people to think “Well yeah, all that stuff about freedom and tolerance and playing by the rules is nice, but these are the bad guys we’re talking about; obviously it doesn’t apply to them.” The vicious cycle this creates between opposing camps is self-explanatory. Taking on this attitude is a central theme of Scott’s (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C, exhibit D) and it’s the one point where I still agree with him wholeheartedly.
Second, consider the opening of Shrek 2.
Farquaad is gone, the new villain hasn’t been introduced yet, but Shrek and Fiona still have problems – not caused by any villain, but by Shrek’s own massive insecurity.
For me, this beautifully illustrates why treating all conflicts as a righteous struggle between Good and Evil is a bad idea. “Ugh, Farquaad is such an asshole” and “can you believe the outrageous thing the Fairy Godmother did this week?” are easy, satisfying conversations to have. And of course, having a cartoonishly terrible dude like Trump in power makes them all the more appealing. But by focusing all your energy on those kinds of conversations, you risk blinding yourself to the fact that after you run all the assholes out of town, you’ve still got problems. You’ve still got limited resources to allocate; you’ve still got disagreements on how to run things; you’ve still got weird byzantine systems full of perverse incentives. That’s where the conversations start that aren’t easy or straightforward or satisfying, because those problems are fucking hard, even (perhaps especially!) when everyone involved means well. I feel like most culture warriors on both Left and Right sorely lack respect for how hard problems of this kind are.
And third, when you zoom in to where the political becomes personal, I would argue that the whole let’s-just-kick-out-Farquaad mentality makes the actually difficult conversations even more difficult to have. Because most of us aren’t Farquaad, but most of us aren’t Fiona either. Most of us are Shrek: basically well-meaning, but burdened with a million little fears, insecurities and prejudices that make us act like assholes sometimes.
Who here has never felt insecure about their own identity and taken that out by insulting someone else’s? Who has never laughed along with bigoted jokes because they desperately wanted to be accepted into a group? Who has never given a group of strangers on the street a wide berth based on how they looked? Who has never kept defending their favourite musician/writer/actor in the face of mounting evidence of abuse, because the truth about their idol was too painful to swallow? Who has never let their racist uncle’s gross remarks slide because they didn’t feel like a three-hour discussion at the family dinner table? Way too many stones are flying for a society where almost everyone lives in glass houses.
Kicking out the assholes is often very hard but at least it’s a relatively straightforward problem. Building communities where well-meaning but flawed people can treat each other with empathy and respect is a lot trickier, and it becomes impossible when we treat every Shrek as a Farquaad to be shamed into oblivion.
Conclusion: “Mistake vs. Conflict” was a stupid post: it was really condescending throughout, the examples were poorly chosen, and Scott’s description of the “Conflict” side was based entirely on strawmen or at best weak-men. However, I think the grain of truth in it is this: there’s a degree to which you can spend your energy on a) ranting passionately against assholes, or b) thinking about structures that don’t condone or encourage asshole behaviour. Both are important and necessary, but focusing too much on either squeezes out the other, and in most political discussion (especially in the US, but to some extent here in Europe as well) the balance has shifted too far towards a).
You are getting a bit too serious for this sub. Which reminds me: We really need a forum for people who like some bits of rationalism, but don’t want the terrible politics.
Some of the “sequences” are actually good. Some of it is “basic philosophy for programmers”, but that’s ok. Even SSC has some good points.
There ar so many obvious ways to use rationalist thought to criticism Trump, the alt-right, populism, nativism etc, but nobody ever does. It’s like there is an agreement that everyone must claim to be liberal, but never take a liberal position or criticize a right winger. As if that’s all beneath them.
I was just listening to a couple of podcasts with Julia Galef, as well-known rationalist. She is clearly a smart person and has some good things to say. I want to enjoy listening, but I keep getting frustrated by her politics. She’s not even terrible the way SSC commenters are. No genocides are advocated for. But she and the people she talks to keep congratulating themselves on how open-minded they are, how they listen to people they disagree with and how willing they are to change their minds. Then every single example is about becoming more conservative, listening to right-wingers and bravely challenging the “SJWs”. And they start gushing over the “Intellectual Dark Web” and how interesting they are. Without ever discussing any of the IDW opinions of course.
What I want from a non-terrible rationalist forum is:
Then again, if the rationalist way of thinking hasn’t actually lead people to do the right things until now, does it actually have value?
You also have to consider that, sometimes, they actually are “Bad People who cannot be reasoned with,” and by design too, as in, it’s their actual strategy. See Innuendo Studios’ videos: “The Card Says Moops” and “You Go High, We Go Low.”
I’m a bit weirded out that you’re putting “freedom and tolerance” on the same level as “playing by the rules.” Playing by the rules is, at best, a means to an end. Freedom and tolerance are the ends.
I understand that things might look like this from a very Internet-based perspective, I’m not sure it’s how things actually are.
I’ll take myself as an example: for anyone who takes a look through my post history, it’s immediately apparent that I spend a lot of time “ranting passionately against assholes.” What is not immediately apparent through this lens, though, is the fact that my internet use is just a tiny part of my day. And guess what: in the rest of my day, I lean way more towards b than a, because b is actually way easier to do in person, IRL.
So most of my anti-asshole-ranting is concentrated on the Internet (and specifically on Reddit), and most of my anti-asshole-structure-building is concentrated in my IRL interactions with partners, family, friends, peers, colleagues or even random acquaintances.
To take another, less personal and less Internet-related angle: I know a lot (a lot) of people who really hate what they call “complainers,” that is “people who complain but don’t actually do anything to change things” (of course, you then quickly realize that these people who hate complainers are actually very pro-status-quo, so their talk of “actually changing things” is in bad faith). So, you get people who get mad at “grievance studies,” people who tell teenagers who strike against climate change to “stay in school,” or, in my country, people who get mad at the Gilets Jaunes movement for “complaining without bring solutions” or “refusing to compromise.” All those people forget that many of the people involved with “grievance studies” or with strikes have also thought in some depth about what structural changes should be made.
Meta-level discussion is dumb and bad. The whole claim rests on a factual assertion
but this is precisely the thing that goes un-argued. I don’t blame you for this - all arguments in this genre fail the same way, the only way to win is not to play.
I feel like this sees SneerClub as something it’s not. The intention here, as I understand it, isn’t to further political debate, show why people are wrong, be a nega-SSC. It’s to catalog the weird aspects of internet rationalism, to be a space for people who disagree with it to point and laugh. When I sneer at someone, I’m not saying, “this person is absolutely irredeemable and should be scrubbed from the face of the earth”, I’m saying “lmao look at this hot take”. Except for when it comes from someone notable, the person behind it is completely interchangeable. This sub doesn’t really have a positive unified “party line”, except for what naturally aggregates in the opposition to the hot takes of rationalist culture.
And honestly, I think the fact that politics trend towards tribalism is inevitable. It’s a good personal goal to be more open-minded, but I think it’s pr much a pipe dream on the social level. I think pretty much all non-trivial politics is identity politics. I guess that’s what Scott would call the “Conflict theory” lol
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Do not write so much
It reads like a coked-up Scott
Go read some Marx, bro
NoBODY ever told me the world is gonna troll me
I ain’t the sharpest tool in /pol
He was lookin’ kinda dumb with his fiiiinger and his thumb
In the shape of an OK symbol
WELL
The sneers start coming and they don’t stop coming
OK that’s all I’m going to do
Here are my counter-counter sneers:
Stop ruining beloved animated films by reducing them to analogies for your armchair psychologizing.
How goddamn ironic since you’re the one reading SSC and sneerclub as a righteous struggle between Good and Evil, nobody else. A sneer is just a sneer, mate.
surely OpenAI has small shell scripts to produce this sort of text should there ever be a need